• Agency for Health Research Quality (AHRQ)
• Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
• The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)
• National Science Foundation (NSF)
• Office of Naval Research (ONR)
• National Coordination Office for Networking and Information
  Technology Research and Development (NCO/NITRD)

Agency for Health Research Quality (AHRQ) 

J. Michael Fitzmaurice, the AHRQ Director's Senior Science Advisor for Information Technology, writes that the Information Integration Workshop will assist AHRQ in understanding the complexities of integrating information in a meaningful way across disparate sources; help develop medical knowledge to guide the formulation of clinical trials; and provide guidance on what works in the practice of medicine in the community. AHRQ's mission is to improve patient safety, quality of care, efficiency, and effectiveness for all Americans via supporting research on patient safety events and health service delivery information to develop and validate performance measures and to determine root causes of medical errors. Obtaining and integrating structured clinical information from health professionals is difficult and expensive, but is necessary to produce research findings that are applicable to a large number of episodes of care across a wide cross-section of geography and sites of care. The workshop could serve as a discussion point about structured ways professionals could record their notes and findings either by using a health ontology, reference terminology, and coding systems developed for specific purposes or by recording information in free, natural text and then paying expert coders or developing sophisticated programs to parse the natural text into concepts that have uniform meaning across geographical areas and sites of care.

For more information about AHRQ, please visit http://www.AHRQ.gov.

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) 

Gary Walter, Computer Scientist, Program Manager, Office of Research and Development, states that EPA would benefit from the Information Integration Workshop because it could play a key role in helping EPA understand the complexities of integrating information in a meaningful way across disparate sources and scientific boundaries. EPA's mission is to protect human health and the environment. One way EPA does this is by supporting mission oriented research. In the information integration area, the Air Quality (AQ) community is achieving notable advances that could provide a model for other data-intensive research fields. For example, the national Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF) effort to build an interoperable infrastructure of data standards and reusable, user-friendly software tools will enable AQ researchers to access and work collaboratively with vast stores of data. Efforts such as the international Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) are linking together strategies and systems, including ESMF, for Earth observation across multiple scientific boundaries. Measurements of air, water, and land made on the ground, from the air, or from space will need to be fused, manipulated, and mined. GEOSS will revolutionize our understanding of the Earth and how it works. Information integration techniques are a necessary technology component to get us there.

For more information about the EPA, please visit http://www.epa.gov.

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) 

Robert Chadduck, Director of Research for The National Archives and Records Administration's (NARA) Electronic Records Archives (ERA) Program, writes that "NARA would benefit from the II Planning Meeting and Workshop by seeking to stimulate research in technologies supporting information sharing and securing integrative context-aware petascale storage and management enabling access with appropriate safeguarding." The National Archives is the U.S. record keeper and public trust that safeguards the records of the American people and provides direction and assistance to Federal agencies on records management, retention, storage, and disposition, including military personnel files and presidential records such as medical records, Government records collections, homeland security, national defense, and electronic government and supports presidential libraries and the national network of regional records centers. The research goal of NARA's ERA Program is to stimulate technology innovation and understanding in the acquisition, storage, and management of the rapidly growing, complex electronic records holdings that are increasingly compounded by heterogeneous sensitivities such personal privacy, national security, and other non-disclosure requirements.

For more information about the NARA, please visit http://www.nara.gov.

National Science Foundation (NSF) 

Sylvia Spengler and Jim French, NSF Program Directors, Science and Engineering Information Integration and Informatics (SEIII) program, Information and Intelligent Systems Division, Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering write that "our interest in the Information Integration Workshop is to identify the fundamental computer science research needed to achieve effective information integration to achieve seamless access to data resources by all. We see effective information integration as a crucial component of the technology needed to forge large-scale advances in all the science and engineering disciplines." The NSF is the Federal government's only agency dedicated to the support of education and fundamental research in all scientific and engineering disciplines to ensure that the United States maintains leadership both in scientific discovery and the development of new technologies. Science and engineering research and education have become global, distributed, and data intensive. The domains of modern science and engineering are increasingly interdependent, with data gathered in one domain being necessary for research and education in another. Networked, distributed research has brought new demands to data management and access, making information integration a part of the practice of science and engineering. The SEIII program is focused on accelerating advances in science and engineering by advancing the state of the art in information integration.

For more information about NSF, please visit http://www.nsf.gov.

Office of Naval Research (ONR) 

Dr. Wendy L. Martinez, Program Manager at the Office of Naval Research (ONR) states that the Integration Information Workshop will allow her to emphasize her interest in the areas of uncertainty including modeling, estimation, propagation, fusion; visualization including human-centered tools for analysis, interactive methods; and human use and usability. ONR's mission is to plan, foster, and encourage scientific research in recognition of its paramount importance as related to the maintenance of future naval power, forced entry capability, and the preservation of national security. ONR coordinates, executes, and promotes the science and technology programs of the United States Navy and Marine Corps through schools, universities, government laboratories, and nonprofit and for-profit organizations. In current and future operational environments such as Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), warfighters require technologies to support information needs regardless of location and consistent with the user's level of command and operational situation. To support this need, the DOD has developed the concept of Network Centric Warfare (NCW) defined as "military operations that exploit state-of-the-art information and networking technology to integrate widely dispersed human decision makers, situational and targeting sensors, and forces and weapons into a highly adaptive, comprehensive system to achieve unprecedented mission effectiveness." Net-centric operations include communications and information assurance capabilities to enable all-source data access, multi-source processing, and tailored dissemination to Command and Control (C2) and Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance (ISR) users across the network. The operational benefits sought are increased speed, accuracy, and precision of command; distributed self-synchronization; flexibility and adaptability to an operational situation; and decision superiority. To accomplish this, it must be possible to automate understanding of the battlespace by identifying objects, determining relationships among the objects, assessing intent, and automatically generating courses of action with associated risks and uncertainty.

For more information about Office of Naval Research see http://www.onr.navy.mil.

National Coordination Office for Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NCO/NITRD) 

Sally E. Howe, NCO Associate Director, and Frankie King, the NCO's Technical Coordinator for the Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program's Human Computer Interaction and Information Management (HCI\&IM) Coordinating Group (CG), write that "the NCO will assist the HCI\&IM CG and program managers in planning the Information Integration Workshop and in preparing a workshop report that describes and raises national awareness of the state of the practice, the state of the art, and research that is needed to manage, access, and integrate today's vast, increasingly complex, and distributed information for the benefit of the science, engineering, and technology communities and society at large. In its role of coordinating the \$2 billion 12-agency NITRD Program, the NCO supports interagency program planning, budgeting, and assessment by providing technical support for meetings, workshops, and the preparation of Government reports."

For more information about the NCO, please visit http://www.nitrd.gov.